Storage Virtualization, SNIA Piffle… and… oh, Good News!

A blog ranting about  industry phrases and on how the Storage Network Industry Association hasn’t helped my life. But, after I’ve had a good moan, a short piece on “storage virtualization according to Object Matrix” and finally some really good news.

Grrrr! Buzzwords!

The best buzzwords that come out of industries are ones that actually mean something. “Plug and Play” for instance… it might not have worked from day one – it might have been abused by people “wishing” (aka: lying) that their products were plug and play, but at least the person on the streets knew what it was supposed to mean. I plug in the new piece of hardware, and it works. No messy configuration, software operations or IT degree required. As Tony the Tiger would say: “Grrreat!”

The worst buzzwords are the ones that don’t mean anything, or whose meanings have been so abused by twisted marketeers that the words have become mere fillers; words that allude to greatness, but that actually are a waste of time to even contemplate reading:  “Highly reliable”, “Object Database” etc. Yes, but what do those phrases really mean?

And I, hands up, have to say that I am as guilty as anyone of having used them. What has really annoyed me with MatrixStore software over the years is how to describe it, and especially, how to create a meaningful  “elevator pitch” for a product with so many concepts incorporated within it. And this problem is made 10x worse not least because there is so little definition around storage technology phraseology. Here’s my elevator pitch of yesteryear:

“Object Matrix? We have developed storage virtualization software that allows you to create an object store for maintaining data in a scalable disk-based archive, either in the cloud or in your own data centre. It uses the latest off-the-shelf hardware, MacOSX, Linux and a loosely-coupled, asymmetric architecture that does not rely on control nodes of any sort.”

It’s kind of geek-speak mixed with marketing gab. I don’t think 99% of non-technical people understood my old elevator pitch, and even technical minded people had a different “understanding” of the terms involved. Why? I blame SNIA!

SNIA Piffle…

Surely there is an organization that can help? Isn’t there someone that can create concrete definition around otherwise vague terminology? Of course SNIA! Let’s see how they define, e.g., Storage Virtualization:

1. The act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal functions of a storage (sub)system or service from applications, host computers, or general network resources, for the purpose of enabling application and network-independent management of storage or data.

2. The application of virtualization to storage services or devices for the purpose of aggregating functions or devices, hiding complexity, or adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources.

Sheesh. Thanks SNIA!* In the first instance you could be describing any server application, in the second instance you could be describing, erm, any server application. I’d describe the definition as loose at best: no wonder everyone has a different understanding of Storage Virtualization. (And you can take any term in my typical old pitch and apply the same – too many things mean different things to different people).

[*edit: I would like to mention that I often DO find good definitions on the SNIA site - but I don't agree with this one]

Looking next at Wikipedia. It defines storage virtualization as “the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage.” At, “any layer in the storage software and hardware stack.”

Who said Wikipedia is full of tosh? For me the definition says twice as much as our SNIA one in about 1/5th of the words. I like it!

A great start! But then of course, ignoring that great start, the Wikipedia entry goes on to imply storage virtualization is about I/O redirection… I wonder who the author works for. Well. Not really. I can guess. It seems Wikipedia is written by marketing guys after all.

Grrr. There is no source to go to. I do wish that SNIA would employ more independents over company representatives. I wish that we could all talk the same techie-language. Or failing that to at least talk in plain English! Rant over.

One small aside: Drunken Data has a piece on Storage Virtualization (whatever that means) marketing foo in his blog here.

Storage Virtualization According to Object Matrix

When OM talks about Storage Virtualization we mean that MatrixStore aggregates all our hardware nodes to present a single storage location. The application using the storage location doesn’t need to know which node data is being stored to, nor from which node data is read.

MatrixStore presents a single storage interface, a single management interface, and it adds a bunch of functionality such as load balancing, replication, etc, etc.

The weakness of most “storage virtualisation” solutions is that if the storage virtualization layer goes down, your data is severe risk. E.g., losing the metadata server could mean becoming practically unable to locate data on a disk (yet alone data across a cluster). MatrixStore is different. Remove the MatrixStore layer or lose metadata, and your data is still there, sitting in files on standard file systems. MatrixStore has no controllers, just a loosely coupled set of nodes working to provide a storage location.

The Good News

The great news for me is that my “elevator pitch” is about to get a lot lot shorter. As of October, Object Matrix will be selling pre-installed storage nodes. From that day onwards when the man in the elevator asks me, “What does Object Matrix do?,” I can answer:

“Object Matrix? We sell a plug-and-play disk-based archive. You just plug together as much storage as you need and the system will automatically maintain the integrity of all the data stored for as long as you want to keep it”.

It has been a long journey from being a technician to being able to talk in layman’s terms, but perhaps it isn’t until one can describe a product in a short journey that it technically makes sense.

There’ll be more details on our forthcoming plug and play archive to come over the next month.

Some Links

Wikipedia Storage Virtualization Definition

Wikipedia Elevator Pitch

SNIA Storage Virtualization document (pdf)

Drunken Data Storage Virtualization Foo